No
episode in the history of the Catholic Church is so misunderstood as the condemnation of Galileo. It is, in Newman's
phrase, the one stock argument used to show that
science and Catholic dogma are antagonistic. To the
popular mind, the Galileo affair is prima facie evidence
that the free pursuit of truth became possible only after science "liberated" itself from the theological
shackles of the Middle Ages. The case makes for
such a neat morality play of enlightened science versus
dogmatic obscuratism that historians are seldom tempted to correct the anti-Catholic "spin" that is usually
put on it. Even many intelligent Catholics would
prefer that the whole sorry affair be swept under a
rug

John
Paul II and Galileo

This
is not, however, the attitude of Pope John Paul II. In 1979, he expressed the wish that the Pontifical Academy
of Sciences conduct an in-depth study of the celebrated
case. A commission of scholars was convened, and
they presented their report to the Pope on October 31, 1992. Contrary to reports in The New York Times and other
conduits of misinformation about the Church, the Holy
See was not on this occasion finally throwing in the
towel and admitting that the earth revolves around the sun. That particular debate, so far as the Church was
concerned, had been closed since at least 1741 when Benedict
XIV bid the Holy Office grant an imprimatur to the
first edition of the Complete Works of Galileo

What
John Paul II wanted was a better understanding of the whole affair by both scientists and theologians. It has
been said that while politicians think in terms of weeks
and statesmen in years, the Pope thinks in centuries.
The Holy Father was trying to heal the tragic
split between faith and science which occurred in the 17th century and from which Western culture has not
recovered. Following the guidelines of the Second Vatican
Council, he wished to make clear that science has
a legitimate freedom in its own sphere and that this freedom was unduly violated by Church authorities in
the case of Galileo.

But
at the same time--and here the secular media tuned out--the
Holy Father pointed out that "the Galileo case has been a sort of 'myth,' in which the image fabricated
out of the events was quite far removed from the
reality. In this perspective, the Galileo case was the
symbol of the Church's supposed rejection of scientific progress." Galileo's run-in with the Church, according
to the Pope, involved a "tragic mutual incomprehension"
in which both sides were at fault. It was
a conflict that ought never to have occurred, because faith and science, properly understood, can never
be at odds.

Since
the Galileo case is one of the historical bludgeons
that are used to beat on the Church--the other two being the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition--it
is important that Catholics understand exactly
what happened between the Church and that very great
scientist. A close look at the facts puts to rout almost every aspect of the reigning Galileo legend.

The
Victorian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley, who had no brief for Catholicism, once examined the case and concluded
that "the Church had the best of it." The most
striking point about the whole affair is that until
Galileo forced the issue into the realm of theology, the Church had been a willing ombudsman for the
new astronomy. It had encouraged the work of Copernicus
and sheltered Kepler against the persecutions
of Calvinists. Problems only arose when the
debate went beyond the mere question of celestial mechanics. But here we need some historical background.

"Saving
the Appearances"

The
modern age of science began in 1543 when Nicholas Copernicus,
a Polish Canon, published his epochal On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs. The popular view is
that Copernicus "discovered" that the earth revolves around
the sun. Actually, the notion is at least as old as the ancient Greeks. But the geocentric theory, endorsed
by Aristotle and given mathematical plausibility
by Ptolemy, was the prevailing model until Copernicus.
It was given additional credibility by certain
passages of Scripture, which seemed to affirm the mobility of sun and the fixity of the earth. Most early
Church Fathers simply took it for granted; but they
weren't really interested in scientific explanations
of the cosmos. As St. Ambrose wrote, "To discuss the nature and position of the earth does not help
us in our hope of the life to come."

Prone
as we are to what C. S. Lewis called "chronological
snobbery," we must try to understand the prevailing attitude toward science when Galileo began his
work. Since the time of the Greeks, the purpose of astronomy
was to "save the appearances" of celestial phenomena.
This famous phrase is usually taken to mean the resorting to desperate expedients to "save" or rescue
the Ptolemic system. But it meant no such thing. To
the Greek and medieval mind, science was a kind of formalism,
a means of coordinating data, which had no bearing on the ultimate reality of things. Different mathematical
devices--such as the Ptolemaic cycles-- could be advanced to predict the
movements of the planets,
and it was of no concern to the medieval astronomer
whether such devices touched on the actual physical
truth. The point was to give order to complicated
data, and all that mattered was which hypothesis
(a key word in the Galileo affair) was the simplest and most convenient.

Toys
For Virtuosi

The
almost universal belief that the purpose of science was not to give a final account of reality, but merely to
"save appearances," accounts for how lightly the Church
hierarchy initially received Copernicus's theory.
Astronomy and mathematics were regarded as the play things of virtuosi. They were accounted as having neither
philosophical nor theological relevance. There was
genuine puzzlement among Churchmen that they had to get
involved in a quarrel over planetary orbits. It was all one to them how the "appearances" were
"saved." And, in
fact, Copernicus, a good Catholic, published his
book at the urging of two eminent prelates and dedicated it to Pope Paul III, who received it cordially.

That
Copernicus believed the helioocentric theory to be a true description of reality went largely unnoticed. This
was partly because he still made reassuring use of Ptolemy's
cycles and epicycles; he also borrowed from Aristotle
the notion that the planets must move in circles because that is the only perfect form of motion.
There was, moreover, the famous preface by Osiander,
a Protestant who oversaw the printing of the first
edition. Osiander knew that Luther and Melanchthon
violently opposed any suggestion that the earth revolves around the sun. So he wrote an unsigned preface,
which everyone took to be Copernicus's, presenting
the theory as a mere mathematical devise for charting
the movements of the planets in a simpler manner than the burdensome Ptolemaic system, one that was
not meant to be a definitive description of the heavens.

The
Copernican Revolution

But
in reality Copernicus's book marked a sea change in human thought, one that caught the universities even more
off guard than the Church. Owen Barfield, in his fascinating
book Saving the Appearances, calls it "the real turning-point" in the history of science: "It
took place when Copernicus (probably--it cannot be regarded as certain) began to think,
and others, like Kepler and Galileo, began to affirm
that the heliocentric hypothesis not only saved the
appearances, but was physically true .... It was not simply a new theory of the nature of celestial movements
that was feared, but a new theory of the nature
of theory; namely, that, if a hypothesis saves all
the appearances, it is identical with truth."

Copernicus
had delayed the publication of his book for years because he feared, not the censure of the Church, but
the mockery of academics. It was the hide-bound Aristotelians
in the schools who offered the fiercest resistance
to the new science. Aristotle was the Master of Those Who Know; perusal of his texts was regarded as almost
superior to the study of nature itself. The Aristotelian
universe comprised two worlds, the superlunary
and the sublunary. The former consisted of the moon and everything beyond; it was perfect and imperishable.
The latter was the terrestrial globe and its
atmosphere, subject to generation and decay, the slagheap
of the cosmos.

Ptolemy's
methodizing of Aristotle to explain the motion of the stars was part of this academic baggage. And
it made perfect empirical sense; by using it, ships were
able to navigate the seas and astronomers were able
to predict eclipses. So why give up this time- honored system for a new,
unproved cosmology which not only
contradicted common sense (as no less an authority than
Francis Bacon averred), but also the apparent meaning of Scripture?

Galileo's
Telescope

Such
was the scientific mind of Europe when Galileo burst
on the scene in 1610 with his startling telescopic discoveries. Up to that point, the forty-six year-old
Galileo had been interested mainly in physics, not
astronomy. His most famous accomplishment had been the formulation of
the laws of failing bodies. (Contrary to legend, he never dropped anything from the Tower
of Pisa.) Galileo was a gifted tinkerer, and when he
heard about the invention of the telescope in Holland,
he immediately built one for himself, characteristically taking full
credit for the invention.

Looking
through his new spyglass, he made some discoveries
which shook the foundations of the Aristotelian
cosmos. First, he saw that the moon was not a perfect sphere, but pocked with mountains and valleys
like the earth. Second, and more astonishing, Jupiter
had at least four satellites. No longer could it
be said that heavenly bodies revolve exclusively around the earth. Finally, he observed the phases of Venus,
the only explanation of which is that Venus moves
around the sun and not the earth.

The
response to these discoveries ranged from enthusiastic
to downright hostile. The leading Jesuit astronomer of the day, Christopher Clavius, was skeptical;
but once the Roman college acquired an improved
telescope, he saw for himself that Galileo was right
about Jupiter's moons, and the Jesuits subsequently
confirmed the phases of Venus. These men were not ready to jump on the Copernican bandwagon, however;
they adopted as a half-way measure the system of
Tycho Brahe, which had all the planets except the earth
orbiting the sun. This accounted quite satisfactorily
for Galileo's discoveries. Still, Galileo
was the man of the hour; in 1611 he made a triumphant visit to Rome, where he was feted by cardinals
and granted a private audience by Pope Paul V,
who assured him of his support and good will.

Galileo
returned to Florence, where he might have been expected
to continue his scientific research. But for about two decades after 1611, pure science ceased to be his
main concern. Instead, he became obsessed with converting
public opinion to the Copernican system. He was
an early instance of that very modern type, the cultural
politician. All of Europe, starting with the Church, had to buy into Copernicus. This crusade would never
have ended in the offices of the Inquisition had Galileo
possessed a modicum of discretion, not to mention
charity. But he was not a tactful person; he loved to score off people and make them look ridiculous.
And he would make no allowance for human nature,
which does not easily shuck off an old cosmology
to embrace a new one which seems to contradict
both sense and tradition.

Cardinal
Newman, who was not one to think that secular truths
are determined by ecclesiastical fiat, wrote concerning Galileo's crusade, that "had I been brought up
in the belief of the immobility of the earth as though
a dogma of Revelation, and had associated it in my
mind with the incommunicable dignity of man among created beings, with the destinies of the human race, with
the locality of purgatory and hell, and other Christian
doctrines, and then for the first time had heard
of Galileo's thesis.... I should have been at once
indignant at its presumption and frightened at is speciousness, as I can never be, at any parallel novelties
in other human sciences bearing on religion."

The
Astronomer's Beligerence

But
Galileo was intent on ramming Copernicus down the throat
of Christendom. The irony is that when he started his campaign, he enjoyed almost universal good will
among the Catholic hierarchy. But he managed to alienate
almost everybody with his caustic manner and aggressive
tactics. His position gave the Church authorities
no room to maneuver: they either had to accept Copernicanism as a fact (even though it had not been
proved) and reinterpret Scripture accordingly; or they
had to condemn it. He refused the reasonable third position
which the Church offered him: that Copernicanism
might be considered a hypothesis, one even
superior to the Ptolemiaic system, until further proof could be adduced.

Such
proof, however, was riot forthcoming. Galileo's belligerence probably had much to do with the fact that he
knew there was no direct proof of heliocentricism. He
could not even answer the strongest argument against it,
which was advanced by Aristotle. If the earth did orbit the sun, the philosopher wrote, then stellar parallaxes
would be observable in the sky. In other words,
there would be a shift in the position of a star observed
from the earth on one side of the sun, and then
six months later from the other side. Galileo was not able with the best of his telescopes to discern the slightest
stellar parallax. This was a valid scientific objection,
and it was not answered until 1838, when Friedrich
Bessel succeeded in determining the parallax of star 61 Cygni.

Galileo's
other problem was that he insisted, despite the
discoveries of Kepler, that the planets orbit the sun in perfect circles. The Jesuit astronomers could plainly
see that this was untenable. Galileo nonetheless
launched his campaign with a series of pamphlets
and letters which were circulated all over Europe.
Along the way, he picked fights with a number of Churchmen on peripheral issues which helped to stack the
deck against him. And, despite the warnings of his friends
in Rome, he insisted on moving the debate onto theological
grounds.

There
is no question that if the debate over heliocentricism
had remained purely scientific, it would
have been shrugged off by the Church authorities. But in 1614, Galileo felt that he had to answer the objection
that the new science contradicted certain passages
of Scripture. There was, for example, Joshua's command
that the sun stand still. Why would Joshua do that if, as Galileo
asserted, the sun didn't move at all?
Then there were Psalms 92 ("He has made the world firm,
not to be moved.") and 103 ("You fixed the earth upon its foundation, not to be moved forever."), not to mention
the famous verse in Ecclesiastes. These are not obscure
passages, and their literal sense would obviously
have to be abandoned if the Copernican system were true.

Scripture
and Science

Galileo
addressed this problem in his famous Letter to Castelli. In its approach to biblical exegesis, the letter
ironically anticipates Leo XIII's encyclical, Providentis-sumus
Deus (1893), which pointed out that Scripture
often makes use of figurative language and is not meant to teach science. Galileo accepted the inerrancy
of Scripture; but he was also mindful of Cardinal
Baronius's quip that the bible "is intended to teach
us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go." And
he pointed out correctly that both St. Augustine and
St. Thomas Aquinas taught that the sacred writers in
no way meant to teach a system of astronomy. St. Augustine
wrote that:

One
does not read in the Gospel that the Lord said:
I will send youthe Paraclete
who will teach you about
the course of the sun and moon.For He willed to make them Christians, not mathematicians.

Unfortunately,
there are still today biblical fundamentalists,
both Protestant and Catholic, who do not
understand this simple point: the bible is not a scientific treatise. When Christ said that the mustard seed
was the smallest of seeds (and it is about the size
of a speck of dust), he was not laying down a principle
of botany. In fact, botanists tell us that there are smaller seeds. He was simply talking to the men
of his time in their own language, and with reference
to their own experience. Hence the warning of Pius
XII in Divino Afflante Spiritu (1943) that the true
sense of a biblical passage is not always obvious, as the sacred writers made full use of the idioms of their
time and place.

But
in 1616, the year of Galileo's first "trial," there was precious little elasticity in Catholic biblical theology.
The Church had just been through the bruising battles
of the Reformation. One of the chief quarrels with
the Protestants was over the private interpretation
of Scripture. Catholic theologians were in no mood to entertain hermeneutical injunctions from a
layman like Galileo. His friend Archbishop Piero Dini warned
him that he could write freely so long as he "kept
out of the sacristy." But Galileo threw caution to the winds, and it was on this point--his apparent trespassing
on the theologians' turf--that his enemies were
finally able to nail him.

The
Opposition Musters

In
December, 1614, a meddlesome and ambitious Dominican priest, Thomas Caccini, preached a fiery sermon in Florence
denouncing Copernicanism and science in general
as contrary to Christian faith. The attack was clearly
aimed at Galileo, and a written apology from a Preacher-General
of the Dominicans did not take the edge
off Galileo's displeasure at having been the target of a Sunday homily. About a month later, another Domincan,
Father Niccolo Lorini, read a copy of Galileo's
Letter to Castelli and was disturbed to find that
Galileo had taken it upon himself to interpret Scripture
according to his private lights. He sent a copy to the Inquisition in Rome--one, moreover, which had
been tampered with to make Galileo's words more alarming
than they actually were. The Consultor of the Holy
Office (or Inquisition) nevertheless found no serious
objections to the letter and the case was dismissed.

A
month later, Caccini appeared in Rome uninvited, begging
the Holy Office to testify against Galileo. Arthur Koestler writes that "Caccini beautifully fits the
satirist's image of an ignorant, officious, and intriguing
monk of the Renaissance. His testimony before
the Inquisition was a web of hearsay, innuendo, and deliberate falsehood." The judges of the Inquisition
did not buy his story, and the case against Galileo
was again dropped.

But
the Letter to 'Castelli. and Caccini's testimony were
on the files of the Inquisition, and Rome was buzzing with rumors that the Church was going to condemn
both Galileo and Copernicanism. Galileo's friends
in the hierarchy, including Cardinal Barberini, the
future Urban VIII, warned him not force the issue. But Galileo only intensified his campaign to get the Church
to accept Copernicanism as an irrefutable truth.

Bellarmine
Challenges Galileo

At
this point, one of the great saints of the day, Cardinal
Robert Bellarmine, entered the drama. Bellarmine
was one of the most important theologians of the Catholic Reformation. He was an expansive, gentle man
who possessed the sort of meekness and good humor that
is the product of a lifetime of ascetical struggle.
As Consultor of the Holy Office and Master of Controversial Questions, he was unwillingly drawn into the
Copernical controversy. In April 1615, he wrote a letter
which amounted to an unofficial statement of the Church's
position. He pointed out that:

1.
it was perfectly acceptable to maintain Copernicanism
as a workinghypothesis; and

2.
if there were "real proof" that the earth circles
around the sun,"then we should have to proceed with great circumspection inexplaining
passages of Scripture
which appear to teach thecontrary......"

Bellarmine,
in effect, challenged Galileo to prove his theory or stop pestering the Church. Galileo's response was
to produce his theory of the tides, which purported to
show that the tides are caused by the rotation of the
earth. Even some of Galileo's supporters could see that this was patent nonsense. Determined to have a showdown,
however, Galileo came to Rome to confront Pope
Paul V. The Pope, exasperated by all this fuss about
the planets, referred the matter to the Holy Office. The Qualifiers (i.e., theological experts) of the
Holy Office soon issued an opinion that the Copernican
doctrine is "foolish and absurd, philosophically
and formally heretical inasmuch as it expressly
contradicts the doctrine of Holy Scripture in many passages......

This
verdict was fortunately overruled under pressure of
more cautious Cardinals and was not published until 1633, when Galileo forced a second showdown. A milder decree,
which did not include the word "heresy", was issued
and Galileo was summoned before the Holy Office. For that day, February 26, 1616, a report was put into the
files of the Holy Office which states that Galileo was
told to relinquish Copernicanism and commanded "to abstain
altogether from teaching or defending this opinion and doctrine, and even from discussing it."

There
is a still unresolved controversy over whether this
document is genuine, or was forged and slipped into the files by some unscrupulous curial official. At Galileo's
request, Bellarmine gave him a certificate which
simply forbade him to "hold or defend" the theory.
When, sixteen years later, Galileo wrote his famous Dialogue on the Two Great World Systems, he technically
did not violate Bellarmine's injunction. But
he did violate the command recorded in the controversial
minute, of which he was completely unaware
and which was used against him at the second trial in 1633.

Papal
Overreaching

This
second trial was again the result of Galileo's tactless importunity. When, in the 1623, Galileo's friend and
supporter Cardinal Barberini was elected Pope
Urban VIII, Galileo naturally thought that he could get the decree of
1616 lifted. Urban gave several private audiences to Galileo, during which they discussed the
Copernican theory. Urban was a vain, irascible man who, in the manner of
a late prince of the
Renaissance, thought he was qualified to make pronouncements
in all areas of human knowledge. At one audience, he told Galileo that
the Church did not define Copernicanism as heretical and would never do
so. But at the same time, he opined that all this quibbling about the
planets did not touch on reality: only God could know how the solar
system is really disposed.

As
a scientist, Galileo was perfectly correct in rejecting
this half baked philosophizing. But he grossly
miscalculated Urban's tolerance by writing the great Dialogue. There he not only made it clear that he considered
the defenders of Aristotle and Ptolemy to be intellectual
clowns, but he made Simplicio, one of the chief
interlocuters of the dialogue, into a silly mouthpiece for Urban's views on cosmology. Galileo was mocking
the very person he needed as his protector, a pope
whose hubris did not take such barbs with equanimity.
At the same time, Galileo alienated the Jesuit
order with his violent attacks on one of its astronomers, Horatio Grassi, over the nature of comets (and,
in fact, the Jesuit was right--comets are not exhalations
of the atmosphere, as Galileo supposed.)

The
result of these ill-advised tactics was the famous second trial, which is still celebrated in song and myth
as the final parting of ways between faith and science.
Galileo, an old sick man, was summoned before the
Inquisition in Rome. In vain he argued that he was never shown the document which, unbeknownst to him and Bellarmine,
had been slipped into the file in 1616 forbidding
him to even to discuss heliocentricism. Contrary
to popular accounts, Galileo did not abjure the
theory under threat of torture. Both he and the Inquisitors knew that the threat of torture was pure formality.
Galileo was, in fact, treated with great consideration.
Against all precedent, he was housed with
a personal valet in a luxurious apartment overlooking the Vatican gardens. As for the trial itself,
given the evidence and the apparent injunction of
1616, it was by the standards of 17th century Europe extremely
fair. The historian Giorgio de Santillana, who is not disposed toward the Church's side, writes that
"we must, if anything, admire the cautiousness and legal
scruples of the Roman authorities" in a period when
thousands of "witches" and other religous deviants were
subjected to juridical murder in northern Europe and
New England.

Galileo
was finally condemned by the Holy Office as "vehemently suspected of heresy." The choice of
words was debatable, as
Copernicanism had never been declared heretical
by either the ordinary or extraordinary Magisterium
of the Church. In any event, Galileo was sentenced to abjure the theory and to keep silent on the
subject for the rest of his life, which he was permitted
to spend in a pleasant country house near Florence.
As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote,
"In a generation which saw the Thirty Years' War and
remembered Alva in the Netherlands, the worst that happened
to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable
detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed." And it is notable that three of the
ten Cardinals who sat on the Commission did not sign
the judgment, although we do not know their precise
motives for abstaining.

Unjust
Condemnation

Galileo's
condemnation was certainly unjust, but in no way impugns the infallibility of Catholic dogma. Heliocentricism
was never declared a heresy by either ex
cathedra pronouncement or an ecumenical council. And as
the Pontifical Commission points out, the sentence of 1633 was not irreformable. Galileo's works were eventually
removed from the Index and in 1822, at the behest
of Pius VII, the Holy Office granted an imprimatur
to the work of Canon Settele, in which Copernicanism
was presented as a physical fact and no longer as an hypothesis.

The
Catholic Church really has little to apologize for in its relations with science. Indeed, Stanley Jaki and others
have argued that it was the metaphysical framework
of medieval Catholicism which made modern science
possible in the first place. In Jaki's vivid phrase, science was "still-born" in every major culture--Greek,
Hindu, Chinese--except the Christian West.
It was the insistence on the rationality of God and
His creation by St. Thomas Aquinas and other Catholic thinkers that paved the way for Galileo and Newton.

So
far as the teaching authority of the Church is concerned,
it is striking how modern physics is playing catch-up with Catholic dogma. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran
Council taught that the universe had a beginning
in time--an idea which would have scandalized both
an ancient Greek and a 19th century positivist, but
which is now a commonplace of modern cosmology. Indeed, the more we learn about the universe, the closer
we come to the ontological mysteries of Christian
faith.

This
article is available in pamphlet form from Scepter Press, P.O. Box 1270, Princeton, NJ 08542.